Tripolar Nuclear Risks Rise as New START Ends (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Here's my take. We all sense that the world is entering a more uncertain phase. Alliances feel shakier, trade is fragmenting, and great powers are jostling more openly. But beneath these visible shifts lies something less discussed and more dangerous, the slow collapse of nuclear stability. For much of the Cold War, people were terrified that a world with nuclear weapons would inevitably lead to proliferation and that wars would end up nuclear. After all, rarely in human history has a weapon sat unused in arsenals. But that is what happened. The arsenals remained, but they were bound by treaties, habits, and doctrines about restraint. Arms control agreements capped numbers. Deterrence relationships were relatively clear. Restraint was constrained, if imperfectly, by norms and pressure. It was not a safe world, but it was a stable one. That era might be at an end. The clearest marker was the expiration this week of New START, the last remaining nuclear arms control treaty between the United States and Russia. There are now no legally binding limits on the world's two largest nuclear arsenals for the first time in more than 50 years. Some hope this will be a brief interregnum, and efforts have begun to find a successor agreement, but the broader context is not encouraging. When New START was signed in 2010, it reflected a different world. Russia's strategic forces were aging. China's nuclear arsenal was small and oriented toward what was called minimum deterrence. Now, as Eric Edelman and Franklin Miller write in Foreign Affairs, that world no longer exists. Russia has modernized roughly 95 percent of its strategic nuclear forces, at least according to President Vladimir Putin. More worrying, Moscow has built a vast regional nuclear arsenal. Experts estimate some 1,500 tactical weapons deployable from land, air, and sea. These systems fell outside New START altogether. During the war in Ukraine, Putin has repeatedly invoked nuclear threats, engaging in a scary game of nuclear blackmail. China's trajectory may be even more consequential. When Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, China possessed roughly 240 nuclear warheads. Today, it has more than 600, and is on track to reach 1,000 by 2030, according to U.S. China is fielding a full nuclear triad, land-based missiles, ballistic missile submarines, and air-launched weapons, and moving toward more regular high-alert levels, including the capacity for launch-on warning, launching while an adversary's missiles are still in the air. The Biden administration sought to slow this buildup through dialogue, pressing Beijing to enter nuclear arms discussions. The response was blunt. China would seriously talk only when its arsenal matched more closely that of the U.S. and Russia. As Edelman and Miller note, Beijing views transparency and verification not as confidence-building measures but as vulnerabilities. Arms control is seen as a constraint to be avoided. The result is a three-sided nuclear competition, far more complex than the bipolar standoff of the Cold War. The Economist captures this shift with a vivid image. What Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, once called two scorpions in a bottle, has become three, the bottle more crowded, the scorpions less predictable. This matters because deterrence grows more fragile as the system grows more complex. A bipolar nuclear world was dangerous, but legible. A tripolar or multipolar one is not. Russia and China are cooperating more closely, exchanging technology and conducting joint military exercises, sometimes involving nuclear-capable forces. A bipartisan U.S. Strategic Posture Commission warned in 2023 of the risk of opportunistic aggression or even coordinated pressure across multiple theaters. American nuclear forces, designed for a largely bilateral rivalry, weren't meant to deter two peer adversaries simultaneously. Arms races are dangerous. Numbers creep up. Doctrines blur. The risk of miscalculation rises, not just in war but in crises, exercises, or moments of panic. Modern nuclear systems are increasingly entangled with cyber networks, space-based sensors, and compressed decision timelines. A false alarm or misread signal can escalate far faster than in the past. The danger doesn't stop with the major powers. According to the New York Times, about 40 countries have the technical skill to produce nuclear weapons. For decades, nonproliferation rested on a bargain. Most countries would forego nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees or the promise that nuclear states would manage their arsenals responsibly. Both pillars are now under strain. As doubts grow about America's willingness to protect allies consistently, some are quietly reassessing their options. In South Korea, debate about acquiring an independent nuclear deterrent has moved from the margins toward the mainstream. In Japan, once unthinkable discussions are now whispered among strategists. If such moves begin in Northeast Asia, they will not end there. We are drifting from managed deterrence to its competitive rearmament, from limits toward accumulation, from predictability toward improvisation. For decades, we lived under the shadow of the most powerful weapons in history and learned, perfectly, how not to use them. That achievement is a landmark, but may prove to be fragile and temporary. On Friday, the U.S. and Iran held high-level but indirect talks over the Islamic Republic's nuclear program. The meeting came less than eight months after American bombers and submarines attacked three nuclear sites in Iran and, as American might musters around Iran, prepared to strike at the President's behest. Earlier today, Iran's top diplomat pushed back on international pressure by saying that Tehran reserves the right to enrich uranium. The issue has been a major sticking point between Iran and the U.S. Let's bring in today's panel to discuss this. Wendy Sherman was the lead negotiator in the Obama administration when the U.S. and other powers negotiated a nuclear agreement with Iran in 2015. And Kim Gaddis is a Beirut-based journalist who is a contributing editor to the Financial Times. Wendy, you know, as it turns out, Arachi was, you know, there was Kerry and you and Zarif and Arachi. So the current top negotiator for Iran is the guy you negotiated with for, I'm assuming, hundreds of hours. What do you think of him? And just bottom line, does it look like a deal is possible or likely?

[00:07:43] Speaker 2: So Abbas Arachi is a really tough and capable negotiator. He knows every inch of Iran's nuclear program and, quite frankly, everything else in Iran. He has bona fides with the supreme leader because he was part of the revolution in 1979. So he is quite a match for Witkoff and Kushner, who certainly don't begin to know the level of detail that Arachi does. So I think this will be a very tough go for Witkoff and Kushner. And the president, as we all know, likes to have a quick and swift victory. That will not happen here. This is a tough negotiation. They have to be ready for it. I do think that it's important always to have a credible use of force on the table to put pressure on. The administration is doing that. But nonetheless, this is hard. The president has to decide what he wants. And war is absolutely on the table.

[00:08:45] Speaker 1: Kim, you say in the Financial Times that it feels like 45 years of lessons with the U.S. and Iran are being sort of packed into this one negotiation. Explain what you mean.

[00:09:01] Speaker 3: Well, the U.S. and Iran have been enemies and foes for 47 years. And if you add Israel to the mix, then over the last four decades, five decades as well, Israel has been at odds with Iran through its proxies, whether Hezbollah in Lebanon or Shia militias in Iraq, but, of course, also Hamas, a partner of Iran. And both the U.S. and Iran have learned a lot of lessons about how to deal with Iran. But they have not figured out yet how to bring these negotiations to a conclusion or which Israel would like to see, how to bring down the regime in Iran. But Israel has deployed its firepower and its technical prowesses over the last two years, since October 7, to decapitate and diminish a lot of Iran's regional capabilities. And you can see that there is perhaps a strategy. I don't want to be too positive in terms of giving credit, too much credit to the Trump administration at this stage. There is more knowledge on the table, how to negotiate under pressure, how to approach it than we have seen in the past. But I agree with Wendy. It's not impossible to see a deal come to fruition, but war is definitely still on the table.